Veterans Affairs Committee on March 27th, 2007

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

I understand that.

[Gilles-A. Perron, Bloc, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC]

I don't see why we would give a copy to the minister, since he's the one who signed it. His signature appears on the last page: the Right Honourable Greg Thompson, MInister of Veterans Affairs. We don't need to give him a copy. He already has one. Instead, I think we need to table a copy to the House. The minister has already seen this document.

He signed it, so he's aware of it.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Mr. Chair, I'm not disagreeing. It's just that I don't think it will likely happen this week.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Anders]

Okay.

We have a clean copy to read.

[Brent St. Denis, Liberal, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Will we have the answers to the questions in the overview and to other questions posed today by Thursday?

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Anders]

Why not this? This is my thinking. We're going to hopefully have clean copies here very soon. We'll read through that together.

I wonder--and I turn to my clerk for a look to see whether this may be possible--if we can possibly see if we can have legal counsel here to go through that with us at the next meeting.

[The Clerk]

Do you mean parliamentary legal counsel?

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Anders]

That's questionable. Parliamentary legal counsel would be one.

[The Clerk]

If so, it's very easy to get them on Thursday.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Anders]

I love that. That's a great suggestion.

How does everybody feel about parliamentary legal counsel?

[Brent St. Denis, Liberal, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

As long as it's legal counsel.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Anders]

They're fast. We can get them. How does that sound? They're available. They're lawyers who are available on short notice. Okay.

[Betty Hinton, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Brent, did you want to go through these documents, these comments?

[Brent St. Denis, Liberal, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

I was simply going to go through the original version. I'm not sure if the version Gilles is providing has the comments by stakeholders in it or not, but we'll soon find that out.

[Betty Hinton, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Okay, well, this one does. The statements and testimony concerning the veterans bill of rights that we would get--

[Brent St. Denis, Liberal, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Okay, but I meant the embedded comments.

[Albina Guarnieri, Liberal, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

Do you have an extra copy of what you held up, Betty?

[Betty Hinton, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

You should have received it too.

What it looks like to me, Brent, as I've gone through this, is that these are comments that have been gleaned from every witness we've had in front of the committee, and they've just pulled out all the comments and put them on a sheet. They're done by date and--

[Brent St. Denis, Liberal, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Yes. Not to be picky, but I think the comments embedded in the document are specific to the draft that was put in front of those stakeholders in June, whereas these comments are--

[Betty Hinton, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

These are from witnesses.

[Brent St. Denis, Liberal, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

--from witnesses at meetings, so they're not necessarily correlated. They may be similar, but they are not necessarily correlated.

[Betty Hinton, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

So which one did you want to go through?

[Brent St. Denis, Liberal, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Well, let's see what Gilles' document.... Thank you, Gilles, for helping us anglophones with this presentation.

Mr. Chair, can you tell us if the stakeholder comments are in that version?

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Anders]

Yes, they are.

[Brent St. Denis, Liberal, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Okay. Then I'll leave it to colleagues whether you want to look just at the department's original version or you want to look at comments as you go along. It would be my sense that we ignore the comments on the first go-through. Let's just see what the department suggested, because you don't know--the comments might be just from a grumpy person who had a bad day versus another person who is the head of a 10,000-member organization. We have no idea of the weighting of the comments.